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Simon Willison says the 'dark factory' is the next big thing in AI
By Lauren Edmonds You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. Humans still need to review AI code, for now. picture alliance/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images 2026-04-04T22:47:09.712Z Django co-creator Simon Willison said AI could usher in the "dark factory" era. Coding would be completely done by AI, meaning it could operate without human intervention. "The machines can operate in complete darkness if you don't need people on the factory floor," he said. AI can already write most of Simon Willison's code. The bigger question, he says, is what happens when it no longer needs him at all. Willison, the co-creator of the Django web framework, which thousands of sites, including Instagram, have used to get started, said professionals who use AI tools typically follow a specific sequence: They tell the AI what they want, monitor its progress, and then review the finished code to ensure it's correct.However, what if humans trusted AI to oversee the entire process? That, he said, is called the "dark factory.""There's this idea in factory automation," Willison said during "Lemmy's Podcast" on Thursday. "If your factory is so automated that you don't need people there, you can turn the lights off. Like, the machines can operate in complete darkness if you don't need people on the factory floor."AI has advanced rapidly over the last several years, raising questions over how it could affect the global workforce. While some AI enthusiasts believe the tech will create new jobs, others worry it could replace humans, leaving them unemployed. Some major companies — like Klarna, IBM, Block, and Oracle, to name a few — have all attributed recent layoffs to AI.Willison said some companies are already telling human staffers not to write code anymore. "Honestly, six months ago, I thought that was crazy, and today, probably 95% of the code that I produce, I didn't type it myself," Willison said.Although vibe coding has made it easier than ever to bring an idea to life, that doesn't mean everyone will become overnight millionaires. Having an original, creative idea is just as important as having good tech to make it happen. automation AI Read next
Dark Software Factory: How far are we from it? - LinkedIn
Based on Dan Shapiro's "The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory" Serge Haziyev Serge Haziyev SoftServe•2K followers Published Mar 30, 2026 "If you walk long enough, you’ll get somewhere" (Cheshire Cat) For the last couple of years, the industry often felt a bit like Alice in this story - everyone experimenting with AI tools, but without a clear directional compass. Now that the compass is starting to emerge. One helpful framework is the 5 Levels of Autonomy in Software Development, described by Dan Shapiro in his article “The Five Levels: From Spicy Autocomplete to the Software Factory.” It provides a useful way to understand where teams are today and where the industry is heading, from simple AI assistance toward increasingly autonomous development workflows. One surprisingly free weekend, I had a chance to experiment with the latest Codex and Claude Code using an asynchronous, spec-driven development loop. What impressed me most was the progress these models have made just since the beginning of 2026. One particularly powerful pattern is the build–test–fix loop driven by specification and evaluation. Instead of manually iterating on code (aka “Vibe coding”), the agent repeatedly builds the solution, runs tests, and fixes issues until the acceptance criteria are satisfied. The Experiment To test the reliability of specification-driven development, here is a simple challenge: Build a small application called Talk2Excel. The app allows users to: Upload large Excel files Ask questions in natural language Analyze data locally without uploading sensitive data to an LLM Here is a screenshot of the application for illustration: Talk2Excel Application If you are curious to try this workflow yourself, I encourage you to experiment with this simple prototype repository: https://github.com/shaziyev/dark-software-factory Takeaways Both agents successfully completed the test. Interestingly, it took longer to write the specification than for the agents to produce the code, which leads to a provocative conclusion: we may already be much closer to the Dark Software Factory than we think. Of course, real-world projects with large codebases and complex dependencies are significantly harder to delegate to agents without close supervision. However, the capability frontier is moving quickly. The effective intelligence of LLM systems appears to be roughly doubling every 6-7 months (no kidding about the 6–7 numbers :), see the researc...
An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark ...
Simon Willison is a prolific independent software developer, a blogger, and one of the most visible and trusted voices on the impact AI is having on builders. He co-created Django, the web framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, and tens of thousands of other websites.
Politicians bent on using the internet as tool for social ... - MSN
AI developer and blogger Simon Willison, who has 25 years of pre-AI coding experience, said on Lenny's Podcast : "There is a limit on human cognition, in how much you can hold in your head at one ...
